Let’s start out by saying that The Golden Compass is the worst game of 2007 and perhaps the worst licensed game of the past couple of years. It’s like the E.T. of our time. And no, even Spider-Man 3: The Game doesn’t hold a candle to the pain that is this game.

Instead of going through the entire game in this review, I’ll be focusing on the core gameplay mechanics of the game and why it sucks. The game appears to follow the movie closely, so I want to leave out most of the story parts because that might contain spoilers for those that haven’t read the book (like me).

Assuming you’ve seen the trailer at least once in the past year, you’ll know that this movie-game is about a young girl, Lyra, who is The One and who comes into the possession of the Golden Compass. This compass is actually an Alethiometer, a symbolically coded device that can tell the truth (really!). Being The One, she must travel to exciting, dangerous and far-away places blablabla, Lord of the Rings/Narnia.

Being a little girl
Lyra’s levels are like the worst platformer you’ve played in a while. Invisible walls abound, you can jump on perhaps 1 crate in a level of 100 crates, the controls are horrible and worst of all, the fixed camera hates you. For instance, you might need to run and jump your way on a series of ledge. The camera will pan as you run, so that you see your character almost horizontally. You know what happens when you try to platform a 3D character on an almost 2D viewing field? Lots of falling off ledges and shouting at the screen, that’s what! It doesn’t help that you feel like you’re practically controlling Ecco the dolphin either.

Because you are an idiot, the game puts the buttons you can use in the bottom-right corner of the screen. These are:
A: Jump
X: Context action
Y: Action

Y only comes on screen when you can perform an action though, like doing 10 meter jump while you can normally jump 3 meters. But because the game thinks you are an retarded child, it will show the Y button ahead of time. However, once you press it, Lyra will awkwardly slide to the edge of the game area where she is supposed to so a big jump, and then jump. You can imagine how terrible this looks if you decide to diss the game, go to that Y ledge and just turn around and walk 1 meter away from it and then press Y. Hilarity ensues.

Lyra has a daemon, Pan, who is like a magic animal for the purposes of this review. The dpad controls his four available forms, although his forms are not always available in the game; even if the game can suddenly transform Pan into a form you didn’t have, once the Y button shows on-screen…

Pan’s forms are:
Ermine: Hold X to scan the surroundings for hints and hidden objects
Sloth: The best part of the game: you wear a sloth on your back who can whip to flagpoles etc and then let you swing Lyra around on them (think Price of Persia with a sloth on your back).
Birdthing: Forgot what bird it was, but you can hold X to glide further for those long jumps
Wildcat: Hold X to climb on really specific walls/nets, which never really look that much different from some of the surroundings which you can’t interact with. Best of all though, you can press X to do a quick-roll which is faster than running or bunny hopping.

Sometimes you have to swing with your Sloth, jump off the swing, press Right on the dpad to change Pan into a bird, then hold X, then change back to Sloth and press X to reach a faraway swingpole. Try this if you are bored. Hold the controller in your hand, your left thumb on the left analog and your right thumb on the buttons. Now try to hold left on the analog, press X, press right on the dpad, hold X, press up on the dpad and immediately press X again. You have 2 seconds to do it. Oh and the camera pans so that you can’t see which way to jump to reach the pole. Nice eh!?

There are a couple of "races" against other kids in the game, which you can win by immediately jumping/climbing up a ledge instead of following the kid, and instant-win. Then you see an unskippable cutscene and then you have to repeat the process 3 times. With the same cutscene.. Other races can be easily won by wildcat-rolling to the finish. Gamedesign ftw!

In summary, Lyra’s platforming is a pain and a chore to go through. You can spend an hour on a level, not knowing exactly what to do. Until you talk to someone and that path you already visited is now suddenly the path forward. Or like the start of the game: be stuck in your room, escape out the window, get told that you need to bring shit before you leave, try to take your marbles from a high closet, get told that you can’t reach it, use the NEW interaction point near the bookshelf, throw books at your marbles and then collect them. You can’t just throw the books to start with, you have to actually press Y on the high marbles first…

Almost forgot: there are some stealth sections in the game, where you do shit like throwing a snowball at a guard’s torch. He then moves out of the way with his scent-handicapped dog to get a new torch…

Lying to adults: the Game
Since you are a kid, you lie to adults. So why not make it a gameplay mechanic? Every time you talk to 90% of all adults in the game, you get to play a series of minigames. This is perhaps the worst part of the game. Even if the premise wasn’t painful enough, the minigames are horribly unbalanced. Sometimes you have to press buttons in the order on-screen, sometimes you have to collect or evade red orbs, or sometimes the game just throws near-impossible tasks at you. You have to pass the minigames within the 5-10 seconds you get, or you will fail a question. In the end, you have to have at least a neutral or green state for your conversation or you won’t progress and you’ll have to try to lie your way through all over again.

But let’s say you found incriminating evidence at a place you are locked in. Let’s say the boss of the room you are skulking around in confronts you, and you win the minigame for the question wtf you were doing in the boss’s room. What do you say? You blame the boss for the incriminating things you’ve found… Way to lie, Lyra!

Everytime the game tries to lure you more into the story universe, it does crap things like this to screw it all up. EVERY SINGLE TIME! It becomes a chore after the first time, and never becomes any better.

Using the Alethiometer
You can use your Golden Compass to find out the truth about certain things. Some conversations might give you a question to ask it, or doing secret tasks in the game might lead to bonus questions or symbols. Suffice to say that if you want the achievement for doing all questions, you are fucked. I spent 10 hours on the game doing pretty much everything I could, and ended up with like 2/3rd of all questions.

How does it work? You have a compass with 108 symbols. Every symbol can mean 3 things. So a baby can mean either Malleability, The Future, or Innocence. You get 3 of these concepts at the start, and you have to match them to the correct symbol. You find symbol meanings in the game, so those are automatically selected if you already found them. This part is pretty fun actually, as you try to think a bit to get the right symbol. You always fail at thinking of it yourself, but that’s ok. You need to get only 1 symbol right to ask the Alethiometer your question. The thing then spins its big finger around on the compass, stops at a symbol where you have to press the right button, and does that 3 times. During this thing, you have to keep a reticule in the center of the compass with the LS, and the more symbols you chose correct, the easier it is to center. But it’s doable in the worst case scenario, so it’s always doable.

Looking at this part, it’s apparent that it took the developers a long time to thing of this mechanic, and it works decently. If only they had spent it on the game itself…

Lyra combat
There is no combat. You might encounter bad men or flying robotic insects that want to hurt you, but you kill them by pressing Up, Left, or Right at the right time. Think quick-time events with 1 button. You then dodge them, making them smash scenery which is still intact after the “battle”… Sometimes you do this as Pan too, but a child can do it.

Being an Armored Polar Bear voiced by Gandalf
[img]http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1410/1262584641_e1d9e0e063.jpg[/img
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So you get to ride Iorek Byrnison (the bear) a lot. Pretty cool right? WRONG. This game managed to make riding and fighting with an armored polar bear feel like you are getting a shitbath puke-massage.

You press X to attack, get stuck in combos, never use other attacks because they suck, etc. The real fun is falling off ledges because the camera pans to a sideways view (again!) and taking 5 meter steps because you pressed Y early near a ledge (again!!). You can’t turn fast, so basicly you just button mash near enemies and hope for the best. It’s all really easy unless you don’t stick to the objectives.

But come on! An armored polar bear? How could they fuck this one up?

Summary
I forgot to mention that the game looks like that Return of the King game for the xbox1. It looks shitty and the framerate bearly keeps up (huh-huh), though you’ll never notice it. The music is cool since it’s from the movie, even if it sounds like they use the Pirates of the Caribbean tune a couple of times. However! Lyra sounds almost EXACTLY like Pan. And they interact a lot of times, leading to confusion whose fur is exactly getting frozen, or who is talking to who. And Pan is voiced by [url= http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0383603/]that kid who played Peter[/url] in Finding Neverland. He’s annoying and I want to punch him in the face. He was also Charlie in that terrible remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Both child actors can’t voice-act btw, but Lyra is apparently pretty good in the movie (her real life name is Dakota after all).

Anyway, the game throws annoyances at your face for 10 hours. After the first 4 hours which felt like doing actual work, you kinda settle into the crapness and it gets a bit better afterwards. The story is pretty cool and it made me want to see the movie, badly. You know it’s a trilogy of atheist attacks on Organized Religion, right? I finished it because of the movie-story, skipped through most of the story cutscenes (didn’t want to know too much) but ended up watching the last couple of them anyway.

In the end, what pissed me off the most about this game is how it expects you are a kid with no skills. But then it throws some of the most horribly hard minigames in your face and expects some pretty damn split-second perfect timing in the jumping sections. Kids will hate it and become serial killers. Adults will feel like they are being pissed on, nude, in the arctic, by a polar bear, with armor. The only thing that mildly saved it was that the story was pretty cool. But since it's a movie-game, you can't really give it points for that.

I rate this game:
9 Nick Cage Screams of Agony out of 10



Oh yeah, I played this game instead of finishing Metroid Prime 3 and Galaxy. Remind me to review the sequel when MGS4 is out on the 360.

Also: midget fight: